It follows that motherhood, which we still in a muddle-headed way seem to regard as partly self-indulgence and partly a service paid to a man by a woman, is regarded by the Socialists as a benefit to society, a public duty done. It may be in many cases a duty full of pride and happiness—that is beside the mark. The State will pay for children born legitimately in the marriage it will sanction. A woman with healthy and successful offspring will draw a wage for each one of them from the State, so long as they go on well. It will be her wage. Under the State she will control her child’s upbringing. How far her husband will share in the power of direction is a matter of detail upon which opinion may vary—and does vary widely among Socialists. I suppose for the most part they incline to the conception of a joint control. So the monstrous injustice of the present time which makes a mother dependent upon the economic accidents of her man, which plunges the best of wives and the most admirable of children into abject poverty if he happens to die, which visits his sins of waste and carelessness upon them far more than upon himself, will disappear. So too the still more monstrous absurdity of women discharging their supreme social function, bearing and rearing children in their spare time, as it were, while they “earn their living” by contributing some half mechanical element to some trivial industrial product, will disappear. That is the gist of the Socialist attitude towards marriage; the repudiation of private ownership of women and children, and the payment of mothers. Partially but already very extensively, socialistic ideas have spread through the whole body of our community; they are the saving element in what would otherwise be a moral catastrophe now, and the Socialist simply puts with precise definition the conclusions to which all but foolish, ignorant, base or careless people are moving—albeit some are moving thither with averted faces. Already we have the large, still incomplete edifice of free education, and a great mass of legislation against child labour; we have free baths, free playgrounds, free libraries,—more and more people are coming to admit the social necessity of saving our children from the private enterprise of the milkman who does not sterilize his cans, from the private enterprise of the schoolmaster who cannot teach, from the private enterprise of the employer who takes them on at small wages at thirteen or fourteen to turn them back on our hands as ignorant hooligans and social wastrels at eighteen or twenty.... But the straightforward payment to the mother still remains to be brought within the sphere of practical application. To that we shall come. Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _A. C. FIFIELD’S NEW LIST._ THE BISHOPS AS LEGISLATORS: